The Last Straw

Just before dark, as “Killer” (my minia­ture Daschund) and I walked through the woods, we heard the break­ing and falling of a huge limb. It was almost sur­real. There was no storm. The tree from which it fell seemed healthy. For­tu­nately, no one was under the tree when the mighty limb came crash­ing down. The limb was dead — and prob­a­bly had been for a long time. It was sim­ply its time to fall. The last, per­haps even small­est wooden splin­ter to give way, started the inevitable chain reac­tion that led to the sounds of the limb break­ing and crash­ing to the ground.

Nature has a lot of this, if you look real close. One snowflake too many and you have an avalanche that shakes the ground like an earth­quake and kills skiers as it all gives way and comes rum­bling down the moun­tain. It is nature’s ver­sion of “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” It really isn’t just that one straw. It is just that it is the final straw.

Of the tril­lions of tons of pres­sure on the slid­ing plates beneath Cal­i­for­nia, it will be the last tol­er­a­ble ounce that starts the process that is able to level cities. The Tip­ping Point is an inter­est­ing book about how things change. Some­times remote almost out-of-context events hap­pen and entire indus­tries are born or reborn. It is enough to make you believe in the Ori­en­tal adage that “a but­ter­fly flaps its wings and a hur­ri­cane begins halfway around the world.”

One of many shots is fired in a street riot. A par­tic­u­lar per­son is need­lessly killed, and a rev­o­lu­tion begins that brings down a dic­ta­tor and shakes the rest of the world into a new aware­ness. One bul­let. One per­son. An inno­cent car­pen­ter was cru­ci­fied one day in a remote part of the world. He was poor and despised. His death and res­ur­rec­tion began the great­est shift in human aware­ness in his­tory. One man. One cross. One cru­ci­fix­ion too many. The last straw.